[SPOILERS] Lurker discussion thread ... players keep out obviously

[Ravus Sol]

Not really. They really show surprising lack of direction. They have no idea what they want to achieve with Grigori. No victory target. No long or medium term plan of any sort. No internal team communication. And even not enough focus to react to events on turn by turn basis. It's like watching an AI play. On low difficulty level.

Baring a complete disaster Kyan will win this game. Nicolae is still not comfortable with the mod. Gaspar and Rawkking will compete for the same scraps of living space, and will come out weaker from that. And even if not, Gaspar is too far to effectively contest with Kyan. Brian still didn't present a reliable and coherent plan for his war and given his initial expansion he'll be probably backward in tech. And Kyan speeds unopposed towards Puppet Fuelled Water Elemental Swarm Of Doom ™.

Did I mention Keelyn is broken and we didn't gimp Kyan's start enough?

Indeed you did! If I could do the map again the Elohim would have gotten more resources and rivers, The Sheaim a wheat resource in the capital BFC and the Clowns would have been gimped with more barbarians and less floodplains.

In my defence I never expected the clowns to leverage those beautiful Lizardmen into a permenant NAP from their neighbour who then cedes all the nice floodplains to them... That was FAR to big a deal to hand away.

[Square Leg]

-Heroic Strength (+1 str)
-Sentry 1 (+1 vis)
-Stoneskin (+2 def str, +3 first strike. Expires after combat)

All hail the new king of the world.

Does Kyan have a midas touch or what?!?!

[mackoti]

Well in my defence i gave on this game before i get to vacantion because i realy felt that i took over Acalostas game and after I realized that FFh its not my strong point .

And its true after my return we didn't talk about strategy or something altought i had a sandbox made up to turn 90, inwich i would have chariots and 7 cities setled, but as i said this is Acolastas game and i took over it and because of that i didn't want to get more involved because i realy am a freak contro and not a team player.

[Ilios]

Why the hell would Krill/Kyan build the Catacomb? You just need 2-3 with Mages' Guilds and you're good to go.

[Mist]

At this point I guess something along the line "Because why not?" might be the right answer. They are far ahead and they know it, they might afford the extravagance.

[Mist]

A FFH Culture Victory is a simple affair. The goal is to:

I have never seen someone so right and so wrong at the same time. Yes, Culture Victory is simple and relatively fast. Properly set up it does not take much longer than a dedicated push for Tower.

But the methods Azoth listed as a way to reach it. Eh, pure

[Commodore]

So, how does one win culture in FFH? I'll confess I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, as the few games I've plonked about on have been dominion affairs.

[Mist]

The Basics are simple, you need 3 legendary cities. Legendary city is 25000 culture. The 'keep it simple principle' also states that to get there you need to stack as many cultural % bonuses as possible on the highest possible base input.

%ages are simple, there's

Liberalism - +100%
Temples - +20% each, you can have five of them
Pagan Temple - +10%
Carnival - +20%
Republic - +20%
Foreign Trade - +20%

For a grand total of +270%. If you're fussy, you can also throw the Lyre into one of the cities for another +100%

Base culture on the other hand is way more tricky.

There are wonders, but they are expensive in hammers, provide not more than 10 base and most of them pollutes your GPP pool. GPP pool is important and you want to keep it as pure on Artists as possible. Each Great Artist is worth around 2500 culture, and knocks 3% of overall goal.

There's commerce converted via culture slider.

And there are artist specialists.

Let's look at the last two. The biggest source of commerce are cottages. The most you can get from one of those is +4 ( base ) + 1 ( river ) + 1 ( taxation ) + 1 ( financial ) + 1 ( golden age ) for a grand total of 8. You can have at most 20 of those, assuming you cottaged every tile in the city's BFC and you have enough health to support the population of this size. Happy is usually not a problem, since 100% culture slider provides +10 from theaters. Note that working 20 cottages doesn't leave you any excess food for specialists, but that's not really required right?

Wrong, let's look at humble bard specialist. He starts at humble +4 culture. He gets +2 from Theater of Dreams. He gets +2 from Hall of Kings, so at this point he's as good as fully grown and boosted cottage. But this is not the end, because there's also Caste System that provides another +2 for a grand total of 10 culture per turn. And he also provides Great Artist points!

The conclusion is that bard specialist is strictly better than a cottage in all conditions. Therefore what needs to be optimized is the number of those that can be run concurrently.

First point of note is that Liberalism allows you to run unlimited bards. Therefore natural conclusion is to get highest possible food surplus to get use of that. Thus farming everything in sight is advisable, as is getting Sanitation. This also makes Agrarianism seem possibly a better choice than Foreign Trade.

But that's also a false dilemma and blind avenue, because you see, just going for highest possible surplus does not push the bard abuse far enough. What you really want to do is this :

Farm everything in sight of the three chosen cities and go into Sacrifice the Weak. Grow them as large as possible, even if they are vast, unhealthy pits of unhappiness. Once you hit the upper limit ( mid thirites usually, depends on how much health do you have at hand ) swap into Republic/Liberalism/Caste System/Foreign Trade and assign all population in these cities as bards. Don't work any tiles, screw food, let your city starve ( remember, they starve by one population point per turn, even if the get no food at all ). You suddenly get over 300 base culture per turn, which gets +260% bonus. You spawn a great artist every other turn. It takes about 10-12 turns to reach the goal.

And that's how you win culture.

Btw, the best leader/civ combo for that is Cardith with Kurios.

[Square Leg]

Umm - why is there a Grigori Axeman with the Magic Resistence promo???

[SevenSpirits]

The conclusion is that bard specialist is strictly better than a cottage in all conditions.

Well that's not valid logic - cottages also provide food. But your conclusion stands pretty well on its own, luckily. Very interesting!